Now really, $124.00 isn’t a bad price to pay. Over time, a garden bed
will pay for itself in homegrown organic produce, provided you don’t
count in the labor costs. (If you do, all is lost… so don’t. There will
be tears.)

However, what if you didn’t need to spend all that money?

If
you wanted to, you could give up the Most Noble Constrained Order of
Raised Beds and just double dig. You could also grow your own
transplants from seed, which is another money saver. Beyond that,
there’s the compost.

If you’re worth your salt as a gardener, you’re already composting –
yet I daresay very few of us create enough compost to meet our gardening
needs. Most gardeners simply throw in some yard waste and whatever
comes out of the kitchen, creating a measly few buckets of good stuff in
a year.

More enterprising composters will wander their towns and
neighborhoods in search of piles of grass clippings, rotten straw,
manure and even rotten vegetables from local dumpsters.

Yes. I’ve done that.

The ultimate in composting, however, is to grow your own from scratch...